Friday, 22 March 2013

The Great War: writers, historians and critics

Nothing
that I have blogged about in the past four years has been so widely and so
rapidly read as my last two posts: Why reading matters (more than ever) and What larks? Birdsong, the Great War and
cultural memory. Look at the column on the right : you’ll see they are
already well up in my ‘top ten’ blogs. (How could I have known fifty years ago
when I used to listen to Alan Freeman on Radio Luxembourg that one day I should
have a top ten of my own? Or that ‘blogging’ would become not merely a word but
an activity one could indulge in without shame.) I’m grateful to everyone who
wrote to me on the subject of historical and literary responses to the First
World War, and have decided to devote this post to these responses. A couple of
them can be read in full underneath ‘What larks?’; the rest were emailed
directly to me. My thanks to all, for giving me so much to ponder.

The
first message I received pointed out that the same tension between historical
and literary representations of the Great War could be found in Holocaust
Studies. Which made me wonder whether this tension is a generic problem,
perhaps a fault line between the arts and the humanities: literature on one
side, history on the other. Indeed, the second message assured me that this tension
has applied to the representation of war ever since Homer’s Iliad was attacked in Dio Chrysostom's Eleventh
Discourse for not telling the truth about the Trojan War.

I
confess I had to look up Dio Chrysostom [40-120 CE], but found him in an
excellent blog, The Ploughman. The post is headed, We are
hard to teach, but easy to deceive: Dio Chrysostom’s Homer:

There is no doubt that the Iliad and the
Odyssey are masterpieces of literature, telling “a true story” of human nature,
but they are not, in Dio’s view, retelling the truth about what actually
happened. There is a difference.

An
old friend and colleague described a line of thought my blog had prompted: ‘I was wondering, he wrote, ‘what
kind of poetry Rupert Brooke might have written had he survived long enough to
experience Gallipoli or the Western Front. Did only the poets have a chance to
attempt any description and explanation?’ Another friend took me gently to task
because ‘your
latest blog doesn't say whether there can be any common ground between historians
and literary critics.’ He went on:

I
remember being astonished when I heard a WWI historian say that Haig's
battle strategies were 'unduly criticised' and 'ultimately successful'. This
seems to be the mentality of Haig himself who could envisage (and work for)
a victory that left the Allies with only 10,000 soldiers as long
as that was double the remaining 5,000 Germans. Anyone who sends 58,000
men to their deaths on the first day of the Somme, instructing men to walk, not
run towards embedded and impregnable German machine gun
emplacements, is hardly a successful general. It may be true that the
majority of British people regarded the War as well-won, but only because
their sense of duty, community and patriotism, as well as
underinformed trust in politicians and generals, was far greater than
it is now - and part of that long, withdrawing disillusion starts with
Haig and Co.

Peter
and Liz would have agreed. They wrote:

We
were not sure what myths people entertain about that war. We feel that it was a
truly futile and utterly appalling bloodbath, run by some very callous men, in
which the ‘policy’ of ‘going over the top’ was tantamount to mass suicide and
the firing squads at dawn equally miserable and inhumane. Have we got something
wrong somewhere?!

But
it was Vivien Whelpton who offered the most detailed critique of what I had
written. I have her permission to quote at length:

I see faults on both sides of the
divide - the reluctance of readers of the literature (and English teachers!) to
see knowledge of the history as important, and the readiness of historians to
condemn the literature without studying it. In the classroom Owen is
often seen as an 'easy' way to interest reluctant kids - boys especially – in poetry
and there is a lot of lazy teaching of his work; Sassoon is similarly abused
because his epigrammatic poems are so accessible.

The
historians have tempered their views somewhat; few of them would now take the
hostile stand towards the literature of early revisionists like Correlli
Barnett and John Terraine. Furthermore, one only has to watch some of the
programming that appears on television to understand their frustration that an
historical interpretation of the war, around since at least the 1980s, has still
not received popular recognition.

As
you say, the real issue is their tendency to 'treat the literary writing about
the Great War as bad history and the writers as unreliable witnesses not as
poets and novelists'. The 'reliability' of the combatant poets and their right
to speak with authority (and here I come up against the 'combat
gnosticism' sceptics as well as the historians) have, I feel, been unfairly
questioned.We are reading reliable
witnesses - even though they are not writing history - or journalism. The issue
of 'bad history' is more relevant when we come to the contemporary
novelists. Is there a difference between an 'historical novel' and a
novel set in an historical time period? My own view is that if you set
your novel in a particular time period, even if your themes are 'timeless', you
have a duty to be faithful to the history. Faulks needed tunnels in 1918
for artistic purposes; did that entitle him to have them, even though, with the
mobile warfare of 1918, there wasn't any tunnelling? I don't think
so. And, for both Faulks and Barker, the clichés have been just too easy
to exploit. Barker's Regeneration
trilogy I think very fine, and very thoroughly researched, but Life Class turns out all the
cliché-ridden scenes.There are other
writers, John Boyne in The Absolutist for
example, who not only exploit the popular myths but make little attempt to
produce accurate history. Dan Todman is absolutely right to say that
'audiences often believe that works of fiction communicate “deeper truths”
about the war because they reflect their own misconceptions.'

As
far as your passage from Birdsong is
concerned, I would pick out 'We hear nothing from our commanding officer' - as
simply, and without accuracy, taking the 'easy route' of exploiting one part of
the First World War popular myth - the lions led by donkeys part! Then
there is Stephen's view that 'This is not a war, this is an exploration of how
far men can be degraded.' This is not an authorial view, but, given the
extent to which the reader is invited to identify with Stephen, it might as
well be. Again, it is too easy. ALL war is about human degradation,
but war does also bring out some of the strengths of human beings.

Which
brings me to the historians' own myths:camaraderie and enjoyment! I am not suggesting that these were not
an important feature of the First World War, but to stress them to the
exclusion of the more negative aspects is really to create a
counter-myth. It is also important to acknowledge that support for the
war was obtained and maintained by a propaganda machine that cultivated the
(already prevalent) myths of the period - chivalry, sacrifice, nationhood,
civilisation (as opposed to Kultur),
'masculinity' etc.(One of the most
important aspects of the writings of Owen, Rosenberg and others is the ways in
which they 'split open' these assumptions.)This was a war about the balance of power - you couldn't sell it to the
British public like that; it was also a war which had to be fought
'attritionally' until the necessary developments in technology and tactics came
about. In other words, of course the generals knew that their methods
were going to be, for the first few years, vastly 'expensive' on manpower and
would not achieve 'break-through', but they had little choice - they needed to
wear down German manpower. However, they couldn't acknowledge publicly
that the 'wastage' was essential. (Hence the vital importance of myths of
sacrifice.)

Some
of the best writing about the war is in the memoirs - Blunden, especially, but
also someone like Guy Chapman. Are memoirs 'witness' or
'literature'? This brings out the simplistic nature of any attempt to
separate the two.

So I think that the historians are entitled
to demand 'good history' in literature. But the issue of 'witness' is a
much more complex one.

Again,
my thanks to all who contacted me, whether I have quoted from your messages or
not. Further comments will be received with interest and acknowledged.
Meanwhile, I shall continue to ponder these things (especially the teaching of
the Great War and war poetry), and may return to them in future. My next post,
however, will be on something completely different.

Adrian
Barlow

[illustration: German 1914 – 1918 war
memorial, at Ettlingen, Baden-Württemberg. I discuss this memorial in my chapter ‘Mixing Memory and Desire: British and German War Memorials after the Armistice’ in The Silent Morning: Cultural Responses to the Armistice (T.Tate and K. Kennedy eds. M.U.P. 2013,

forthcoming)

The
hyperlink for ‘combat gnosticism’ (see above) takes you to the valuable War Poetry blog, written by Tim Kendall. I
strongly recommend a visit.

Details
of the English Association’s international Centenary Conference on British
Poetry of the First World War, to be held in Oxford in September 2014, can be
found here.

The fine response from Vivien Whelpton has alerted me to something I had never fully questioned: does it matter if a novelist — intentionally or otherwise — misrepresents the past (insofar as it is ever possible to completely disentangle that past and give us a visceral feel for the period — either as history or fiction?) Novelists might perhaps argue that what they are after all writing IS fiction, and perhaps even point to the havoc Shakespeare played with history —which he used as a basis for the expression of the deep wellsprings of human nature. Well, if there are any Shakespeares alive today I must have somehow missed them! But our culture has anyway changed, and if a novel is written about, for example, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, then we expect that every line of every character — even when resulting from prejudice, ignorance, social ‘immersion’, or any other kind of distorted feeling — will be absolutely grounded in, and expressive of, the political situation in which they find themselves.

If it is objected that novelists are not — for the most part — historians, and that they do not have time to research as is they were historians, the fact is that it is completely unnecessary for them to do so. It is not difficult to discover historians who are completely open about the problems presented by lack of evidence and the idiosyncrasies of histories written contemporary to the period under study, and etc. I doubt that any novelist would go far wrong in reading, for example, Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, Jason Goodwin’s The Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire, or Mark Matzower’s Salonica ~ City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950. (I have not read the latter, but nonetheless have complete confidence in it.) Sometime during the war in former Yugoslavia, I read Ivo Andric’s The Bridge over the Drina. There is a quote on the front cover: ‘No better introduction to the study of Balkan and Ottoman history exists.’ I do not disagree with that. After I had read this wonderful novel I had a clearer understanding of the bitter conflicts that had led to that war then I ever got from all the newspaper and television analyses I read or watched.

And if anyone asks why it should matter so much that novelists should attempt to be as accurate about history as they try to be about human nature — arguing that novels tell stories, and we are anyway not going to live forever — I can only answer that I want to have as true a picture of the world as is possible. And if I’m then pressed on that point, I can only side with Aristotle in saying that there is a point where it becomes futile to ask further questions.

(There are several books for children on Henry Ford. One such is Henry Ford: The People's Car-Maker. Well, you know, nice Mr Ford, admirer of Hitler! How early the untruth begins!)Peter

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk